The Map of Physics: Animation Exhibits How All of the Totally different Fields in Physics Match Collectively

From Newton’s mechan­i­cal cal­cu­la­tions to Einstein’s gen­er­al and spe­cial rel­a­tiv­i­ty to the baf­fling inde­ter­mi­na­cy of quan­tum mechan­ics, the dis­ci­pline of physics has turn into increas­ing­ly arcane and com­plex, and fewer and fewer gov­erned by order­ly legal guidelines. This presents a prob­lem for the layper­son, who strug­gles to below­stand how New­ton­ian physics, with its pre­dictable obser­va­tions of phys­i­cal forces, pertains to the par­al­lax and para­dox of lat­er dis­cov­er­ies. “For those who don’t already know physics,” says physi­cist Dominic Wal­li­man within the video above, it’s dif­fi­cult some­occasions to see how all of those dif­fer­ent sub­jects are relat­ed to every oth­er.” So Wal­li­man has professional­vid­ed a assist­ful visu­al support: an ani­mat­ed video map present­ing the con­nec­tions between clas­si­cal physics, quan­tum physics, and rel­a­tiv­i­ty.

Newton’s legal guidelines of movement and grav­i­ta­tion and his inven­tion of cal­cu­lus finest rep­re­despatched the primary area. Right here we see the insep­a­ra­ble rela­tion­ship between physics and math, “the bedrock that the world of physics is constructed from.” Once we come to certainly one of Newton’s much less well-known pur­fits, optics, we see how his inter­est in mild waves antic­i­pat­ed James Clerk Maxwell’s work on elec­tro­magazine­web­ic fields. After this ini­tial con­nec­tion, the professional­lif­er­a­tion of sub­dis­ci­plines inten­si­fies: flu­id mechan­ics, chaos the­o­ry, ther­mo­dy­nam­ics… the guid­ing drive of all of them is the research of ener­gy in var­i­ous states. The heuris­tics of clas­si­cal physics pre­vailed, and labored per­fect­ly effectively, till about 1900, when the clock­work uni­verse of New­ton­ian mechan­ics explod­ed with new prob­lems, each at very massive and really small lev­els of descrip­tion.

It’s right here that physics department­es into rel­a­tiv­i­ty and quan­tum mechan­ics, which Wal­li­man explains in short. Whereas we’re like­ly famil­iar with the very fundamentals of Einstein’s rel­a­tiv­i­ty, quan­tum physics tends to get a lit­tle much less cov­er­age within the typ­i­cal course of a gen­er­al edu­ca­tion, attributable to its com­plex­i­ty, per­haps, in addition to the truth that at their edges, quan­tum expla­na­tions fail. Whereas quan­tum discipline the­o­ry, says Wal­li­man, is “the perfect descrip­tion of the uni­verse we’ve got,” as soon as we come to quan­tum grav­i­ta­tion, we attain “the large Chasm of Igno­rance” that spec­u­la­tive and con­tro­ver­sial concepts like string the­o­ry and loop quan­tum grav­i­ty try to bridge.

On the “Chasm of Igno­rance,” our jour­ney via the domains of physics ends, and we find yourself again within the ethereal realm the place all of it started, phi­los­o­phy. These of us with a typ­i­cal gen­er­al edu­ca­tion within the sci­ences could discover that we’ve got a a lot guess­ter below­stand­ing of the sphere’s intel­lec­tu­al geog­ra­phy. As a helpful reminder, you may even want to pur­chase a poster copy of Walliman’s Map of Physics, which you’ll see en minia­ture above. (It’s additionally avail­able as a dig­i­tal down­load here.) Slightly below, the attraction­ing, laid-back physi­cist takes the stage in a TEDx discuss to demon­strate effec­tive sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tion, clarify­ing “quan­tum physics for 7 12 months olds,” or, because it had been, 37, 57, or 77-year olds.

Observe: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this put up appeared on our web site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of Physics Ani­mat­ed in 4 Min­utes: From Galileo and New­ton, to Ein­stein

The Feyn­man Lec­tures on Physics, The Most Pop­u­lar Physics Book Ever Writ­ten, Now Com­plete­ly Online

The Big Ideas of Stephen Hawk­ing Explained with Sim­ple Ani­ma­tion

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Life & Work of Marie Curie, the First Female Nobel Lau­re­ate

Josh Jones is a author and musi­cian based mostly in Durham, NC.